Posts Tagged ‘Holocaust’

Anna Ferens’ documentary on the life of University of Wisconsin Professor Emeritus Waclaw Szybalski premiered in Madison, Wisconsin.

Professor Szybalski’s research contributed to an understanding of the genetic basis of drug resistant bacterial infections and the development of multiple drug therapies. His DNA research is used in the development of cancer treatments.

Both the film and discussion included Professor Szybalski’s life in Poland. He shared his love of his home of Lvov, Poland which before WWII was a diverse city with a Slavic and Jewish Polish majority along with Ukrainians and others. He spoke of the Nazis’ extermination the Jews of Lvov then the Soviets’ ethnically cleansing Lvov of Slavic Poles by expulsions and murder. Lvov is now the almost 100% Ukrainian city of Lviv, Ukraine.

Professor Szybalski participated in the resistance. The Soviets were allied with the Nazis from 1939 to 1941 and occupied about 1/2 of Poland. Trains crossed occupied Poland with Soviet supplies essential for their Nazi allies to wage war. On their return trip, the trains were often filled with anti-Soviet Poles being deported to Siberia. Among the earliest acts of resistance were attacks on those trains.

He also participated in resistance against the Holocaust which moved me to write this open letter.

Dear Professor Szybalski:

During the questions and answers after the December 8, 2014 premier of “The Essence of Life”, you shared how you helped gather information on the location and layout of one of the extermination camps. That information was smuggled out to the Allies with a plea to bomb the camps and their rail lines.

The Allies did not bomb the camps for reasons unrelated to the information you and others supplied.

The Nazi’s and Soviet’s conquests of Poland placed most of the victims of the Holocaust beyond the reach of rescue by military action for most of the war. After 1939, about the victims’ only hope was for the Allies to militarily defeat the Nazis as quickly as possible.

At great personal risk you succeeded in gathering intelligence on the Holocaust and sharing that with the world.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not be attending the January 27, 2015 ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of Nazi German extermination and concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Soviet troops assisting survivors of the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.

Russia has yet to acknowledge Soviet complicity in the Holocaust. Without that acknowledgement, President Putin’s absence is appropriate.

The history of Auschwitz-Birkenau is also the history of Soviet complicity in the Holocaust:

Prior to Soviet-Nazi military alliance, the Soviet Union provided the Nazis with the material assistance to wage aggressive wars of conquests and genocide:

The treaties that ended WWI prohibited German rearmament. The Soviets assisted the Nazis to evade their treaty obligations by allowing the Nazis to secretly develop and test their new weapons on Soviet territory.

The manganese in the steel the Nazis used to construct their military vehicles, weapons, and ammunition was supplied by the Soviets.

Nazi vehicles were fueled with Soviet oil.

Nazi troops were fed with Soviet grain.

Nazi horses, which made up 90% of Nazi military transportation, were fed with Soviet fodder.

In August, 1939, the Nazis and Soviets upgraded their relationship to include a military alliance:

The Soviets guaranteed that when the Nazis attacked Poland, the Nazis would not face a two front war as in WWI. The Nazis would only face the alliance of Poland, France, and Britain.

While Slavic and Jewish Polish troops were defending Poland against Nazi aggression from the west, the Soviets attacked Poland from the east.

The defeat of Poland by the Soviets and Nazis resulted in the Nazi capture of most of the Polish Jews along with Auschwitz-Birkenau and other sites where they constructed extermination and concentration camps.

From August, 1939 until June, 1941, the Soviet controlled Communist International (Comintern) ordered pro-Soviet Communist Parties, including the Communist Party USA, to support the Soviet-Nazi alliance, to oppose the war against the Nazis, and to oppose U.S. entry into the war. That is among many reasons the U.S. delayed entry into WWII.

By end of 1941 when the U.S. entered the war, Holocaust victims were beyond the reach of military rescue. The death camps and their rail lines were beyond the range of Allied bombers.

In January, 1945 when the Soviets finally reached Auschwitz-Birkenau, they found about 7,000 survivors.

So few were liberated because almost all the victims of the Holocaust were already dead and most of the other survivors had been evacuated to Nazi Germany.

Just as the post-war democratic state of Germany inherited the responsibility for the crimes of its predecessor state of Nazi Germany, Russia inherited the responsibility for the WWII crimes of the Soviet Union.

The obligation for acceptance of responsibility will not go away with the passage of time.

Acknowledging such histories is part of the process of a state maturing to a full member of the family of civilized nations.

The Russian people deserve such actions from their leaders such as President Putin.

In public consciousness and popular culture among the most common questions are why the Allies did not do more to stop the Holocaust such as attempting to rescue victims and bomb the death camps and their rail lines.

Similar questions about the Soviet Union’s conduct are rarely asked.

That may because of a very successful Cold War era propaganda campaign to promote questions about the Allies and divert attention from the complicity in the Holocaust of the Soviets and their allied Communist Parties.

Now that the Cold War is over the time has come to seek information about the Soviet Union’s Holocaust complicity to make WWII history more complete and accurate.

Like this:

In March, 1942, the Nazis with the assistance of French fascist collaborationist government began deporting Jews in France to slave labor and death camps. The first were foreign born Jews followed by Jews born in France and having French citizenship.

In February, 1943, the Nazis imposed Service du Travail Obligatoire (S.T.O.) (Compulsory Work Service). Ethnic French resident of Cherbourg were deported from their homes for slave labor in occupied France and Germany.

Cheryl A. Robinson and I visited the Cherbourg memorial to those and other victims during our 2014 trip to France for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Normandy.

From 1941 to 1943 in North Africa Rommel reportedly refused to implement Nazi orders to execute Jewish and other categories of POWs. Many Jewish soldiers were serving in the British and Polish forces in North Africa.

That is further confirmation of the depth of Rommel’s knowledge of Nazi criminality.

While Rommel may have prohibited the execution of Jewish POWs at the front, no evidence exists that he did anything to stop the Nazis behind the front from rounding up of Sephardic Jews in Nazi occupied parts of North Africa for deportation to slave labor and death camps.

In 1943 when Rommel was given command of Normandy, he used slave labor to construct fortifications.

Stopping the Holocaust or protecting ethnic Germans?

By July, 1944, Rommel recognized that Germany was militarily defeated. Germany no longer had the military capacity to defend its borders.

To continue the war meant that the Soviets would overrun Germany.

Was Rommel’s 1944 dissent motivated by his concern for the potential sufferings of ethnic Germans at the hands of Soviet troops or to stop genocide?

July, 1944 status of the Holocaust

By July, 1944, most of Nazi Holocaust murders had already occurred.

The July 1944 assassination and coup attempts were much too late to save most victims.

Rommel’s role in the attempted coup and assassination

Rommel may not have supported assassination or a coup.

He may have hinted that after others killed Hitler and overthrew the Nazis he would be available to serve in the post-Nazi government and armed forces.

He may have looked the other way while members of his staff planned the coup and assassination. He refrained from alerting the Nazis of the plots to what if anything he knew.

As his troops were being defeated in Normandy he said to his superiors including Hitler that the time had come to negotiate an end to the war.

On July, 17, 1944 Rommel suffered a serious brain injury when British aircraft attacked his car near the Normandy front.

That injury seemed to have decreased his inhibitions on speech.

His comments became less guarded, more frequent, explicit, and strident.

On July 22, 1944, a coup and assassination Hitler were attempted. Both failed.

On October 14, 1944. the Nazis force Rommel to choose between torture, a show trial followed by an execution, and violent retaliation against his family or suicide.

To shield his family from retaliation, Rommel chose to execute himself by committing suicide.

My amateur historian’s assessment of Rommel’s legacy

11 years of personally benefiting from the Nazi’s policies.

5 years of waging the Nazi’s wars of aggression during which the majority of the Holocaust victims were captured.

Being present in Poland when Polish Jewish POWs were executed.

Being in command of troops who executed French Senegalese POWs.

Use of slave labor to construct Normandy fortifications.

After D-Day in 1944, stating that the Allies and Soviets had militarily defeated Germany and that Germany should end the war.

Doing nothing to increase the chances of the success of the July, 1944 assassination and coup attempts.

Dissent motivated more to protect ethnic Germans from the Soviets than to stop genocide.

3110th Signal Service Battalion and Rommel

From February to July, 1944, the 3110th Signal Service Battalion, my late father Felix A. Cizewski’s unit, and Rommel faced each other across the English Channel (La Manche in French).

Rommel was preparing to continue the Nazi occupation of France and the 3110th was building communications infrastructure to facilitate the supplies to the forces preparing to liberate France.________________________________________Links with sources and for more information:

In addition to the monument in the cemetery with the names of the deceased American air crews, Tamerville has also installed a “Tribute to Our Liberators” sign.

The sign details in French and English the stories of four aircraft that went down around Tamerville and recognizes Tamerville’s liberation by 8th Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division on June 20, 1944.

The sign continues with a report on the development of the Tamerville and Valognes area as a major communications center.

The text is one of the most profound tributes to support troops including my late father Felix A. Cizewski’s unit, the 3110th Signal Service Battalion.

Once Tamerville had been liberated by the 8th Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division on June 20, 1944, the village and Chiffrevast castle (former headquarters of Germany’s 709th Infantry Division) were occupied in July 1944 by specialized units of the Allied forces.

Bringing with them high-technology equipment, these women and men of the Signal Corps made Chiffrevast castle the first Allied communications center on the continent. This allowed major Allied headquarters to communicate rapidly with each other.

The castle basements housed many telephone, teletype and radio operators as antennas, transmission stations and barracks containing sensitive equipment were erected in the surrounding fields.

This communications center was operational from August 7 until mid-September of 1944.

During this time, the Signal Corps soldiers bivouacked in nearby orchards. The 3110th Signal Service Battalion, consisting of 13 officers and 220 enlisted men, was among these specialized units to work in Tamerville.

These troops had a supporting role that was essential to the Allied victory, and we owe them our freedom as much as we owe it to those who were at the battlefront. They are honored here.

Another in an ongoing series about our trip to France for the 70th anniversary of D-Day and the Liberation of France and the memorial in Tamerville. Tamerville is among the places where my late father Felix A. Cizewski, served in Company C, 3110th Signal Service Battalion.

George Dennebouy reading his French translation of Leonard Cizewski’s remarks at the Tamerville memorial, May 31, 2014.

Photo by Cheryl A. Robinson

My late father, Felix A. Cizewski, said very little about his service in World War Two. After he died, I looked at his copy of his records and found many gaps. I researched at the National Archives and discovered that he served as private in Company C, 3110th (thirty one tenth) Signal Service Battalion, Army Service Forces.

I once asked him if he ever wished to visit the places he served in Europe

He replied that he first wanted to see everything he could in the United States.

Then he added that if he ever returned to Europe it would be to see how it was rebuilt. He said he saw so much destroyed.

I thought he was referring to the well known destruction of German cities.

As my wife Cheryl and I prepared for our trip, we viewed the World War Two photos and movies of the damage done to Valognes by American forces to liberate it from the Nazis.

That made it clear that my father was referring to what he first witnessed here.

I realize how both the occupation and liberation caused great pain and loss of civilian life in Tamerville. Cheryl and I are here to also join you in honoring the civilians who suffered just as you are honoring the service of my late father’s company.

In February 1944, the 3110th Signal Service Battalion was sent to England where they worked on communications support for the liberation of France.

On July 26, while the rest of the battalion remained in England, my father and Company C landed at Utah Beach and traveled to a bivouac site outside of Tamerville.

My father’s Company C was the battalion’s Open Wire Repair Section with pole and wire construction and maintenance responsibilities.

He may have work on the communications facilities constructed in Valognes and the Chiffrevast Château near Tamerville.

For their work in England and France, my father and the 3110th Signal Service Battalion were awarded the Meritorious Unit Commendation.

On August 19, my father was sent to Cherbourg then to Paris where in December he suffered severe frostbite. After he recovered, he was transferred to the 45th Signal Company, 45th Infantry Division. He provided communications support for the combat units of his division as they liberated Dachau.

After returning from the war he worked as a truck driver in Chicago. He met and married my mother. They raised four children. He was most proud of his family.

When my son watched movies of the battles in Normandy I told him to imagine the ten or twelve men and women– including his grandfather—providing support behind every paratrooper.

Men and women such as my father seem at times to be forgotten or lost to history. I view your memorial for my father’s company as also being a memorial for the hundreds of thousands of women and men who provided support and service throughout the war. Your memorial means they will not be forgotten.

Ten years after my father’s death, you have given me a way to bond with him

Russian archivist and historian Fridrikh I. Firsov and American historians Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes are sharing their research into the recently available Soviet WWII archives in their forthcoming book Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933-1943.

Their research is creating a more complete and accurate history of the Holocaust including Soviet complicity.

The government of the Netherlands admitted Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Among them were the Frank family who fled in 1933.

The Frank family should have been safe and found a new life in the Netherlands.

Instead in 1940 with the direct assistance of their Soviet ally, the Nazis overran Holland.

Soviet material assistance:

To conquer the Netherlands, the Nazis used Soviet oil to fuel military vehicles and aircraft, Soviet fodder for the horses which pulled the wagons that provided 90% of the supplies for the Nazi troops, Soviet grain to feed the Nazi troops, and critical raw materials from the Soviet Union for the construction of military vehicles, equipment, weapons, and ammunition.

Prior to the attack on Holland, the Soviets allowed the Nazis to develop and test weapons on Soviet soil to evade the disarmament provisions of the treaties that ended WWI.

These records reveal the extent to which foreign communist parties were Soviet puppets whose job was to support Soviet foreign policy.

They show how, on Moscow instructions they changed from being anti to pro-fascist and how they desperately tried to portray Nazi Germany as a positive force against imperialism and for world peace.

The Dutch Communist Party followed Soviet orders and supported the Nazis. However, the Dutch Communists had almost no influence on the Dutch government’s commitment to armed neutrality and the Dutch Communists appear to have provided little or no support to the Nazis during the invasion.

In other countries, the effect was more deadly.

On orders of the Soviets, the U.S. Communist Party aligned with pacifists, isolationists, Nazi sympathizers, anti-Semites, and others to oppose U.S. action against the Nazis.

The result was by the time the U.S. joined the war against the Nazis in late 1941, the Frank family was trapped in Amsterdam and millions of other European Jews were already dead.

About the only hope for rescue of the Frank family and other surviving Jews was the military defeat of the Nazis. Amsterdam was so far behind Nazi lines that not until the Allies and Soviets militarily defeated Nazi Germany in May, 1945 were Canadian troops finally able to liberate Amsterdam.

That was much too late for the Frank family and six million other Jews. In 1944 German and Dutch Nazis found the Franks’ hiding place, arrested and deported them to slave labor or death camps where all died except Anne’s father Otto.

Acknowledging the Soviet Union’s share of Holocaust responsibility

The Soviet’s share of responsibility passed to the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union’s successor state, in the same way that modern postwar Germany was held responsible for the crimes of its Nazi predecessor.

In addition, a few existing political parties view themselves as the successors to the WWII era pro-Soviet Communist Parties. As tiny, marginal, and irrelevant as most are, they still share responsibility for their predecessor’s support for the Nazis and opposition to U.S. military action during almost two years of the Holocaust.

Both the Russian Federation government and successor Communist Parties try to avoid responsibly and deflect attention from their two Holocaust years of Nazi alliance by focusing on the Soviets’ war with the Nazis after the Nazis ended the alliance or claims of being “premature antifascists” because of the Soviet Union’s and worldwide Communist Parties’ participation in the Spanish Civil War against Spanish fascists.

While both may wish their Nazi alliance history to disappear down one of George Orwell’s 1984 memory holes we have the power to hold them accountable by sharing as complete and accurate a history of WWII and Holocaust as we can.

Understanding the history of enabling genocide adds insight to enabling present day genocides.

Holocaust history and my family history blog

I occasionally post about Holocaust history in my family history blog to honor the memory of my later father Felix A. Cizewski.

His service in 45th Signal Company provided support to the 45th Infantry Division’s combat units who liberated Dachau.

After liberation he was stationed near Dachau for about 2½ months on occupation duty. He may have shared in the care of the liberated survivors, especially the almost 9,000 Polish speakers as my late father was fluent in Polish.

Diorama in the Truschbaum Museum, Camp Elsenborn, Belgium of a medic treating GI with trench foot and cold injuries to his hands and face. This illustrates what Felix A. Cizewski suffered.(Photo Truschbaum Museum, used by permission.)

On Christmas sixty-nine years ago my late father, Felix A. Cizewski, was in an Army hospital in Paris with severe cold injuries, probably frostbite, to his hands and feet.

He was in a the Open Wire Repair Section of an Army Service Forces Signal Corps company based in Paris.

That meant he was working outside during one of Europe’s harshest winters in decades.

Dad suffered for the rest of his life with what may have been Raynaud’s Syndrome. Every winter his circulation would mostly shut down in his hands and his hands would be very pale and cold.

My father obviously suffered lifelong disability from his cold injuries. Along with the effects of tuberculosis he may have contracted while in the Army and the traumatic effects of arriving at Dachau about one day after its liberation and possibly helping to care for the survivors while stationed on occupation near Dachau, my late father may have been an unrecognized and uncompensated disabled veteran.

What he did and said caused great harm to relations between Slavic and Jewish Poles and between Poles and the world community. That damage lingers to this day.

Both the tiny Polish Jewish community that survived WWII and the Holocaust and the Jewish community worldwide needed thoughtfulness, compassion, and support from Polish leaders.

Instead he continued to make anti-Semitic statements and engage in antisemitic behavior. On issues that required the most sensitive of words, he repeatedly chose harsh anti-Semitic language.

He harmed efforts for post-WWII reconciliation between Slavic and Jewish Poles.

He disgraced the memory and service of the great number of Poles who paid with their lives fighting the Nazis and rescuing their Jewish friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens of Poland from the Nazis.

His anti-Semitism adds to the confusion that lingers to this day that because the Nazi death camps were geographically located in Poland, they were “Polish” rather than forcibly imposed on conquered Poland by the Nazi occupiers.

Cardinal Glemp was repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism, notably for his 1989 remarks resisting an agreement to move a Carmelite convent from Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis. After Jews complained, the Vatican agreed in 1987 to put the convent in a nearby interfaith center. But as a deadline passed and Jews staged protests, the cardinal went on the offensive, saying:

“Do you, esteemed Jews, not see that your pronouncements against the nuns offend the feelings of all Poles, and our sovereignty, which has been achieved with such difficulty? Your power lies in the mass media that are easily at your disposal in many countries. Let them not serve to spread anti-Polish feeling.” He added, “Dear Jews, do not talk with us from the position of a people raised above all others, and do not dictate conditions that are impossible to fulfill.”

The ensuing firestorm reignited old controversies in a largely rural land where the prewar Jewish population of 3.5 million had dwindled to a few thousand. But the cardinal did not back down until the Vatican reaffirmed the pope’s determination to move the convent. The issue resurfaced in 1991, when Cardinal Glemp, touring the United States, encountered more protests and told Jewish leaders that he regretted the pain his statements had caused.

In 1997, Cardinal Glemp belatedly rebuked a rabidly anti-Semitic radio station, Radio Maryja, and the Rev. Tadeusz Rydzyk, who mingled daily outpourings of hate with prayer. The cardinal acted only after Vatican hints and a prosecutor’s slander charges.

In 2001, Cardinal Glemp was again accused of anti-Semitism when he refused to accompany President Kwasniewski to the village of Jedwabne to apologize for the 1941 massacre of 1,600 Jews, most of them burned alive in a barn by Polish neighbors. The cardinal disavowed “ostentatious penance” in advance, and said, “I prefer not to have politicians impose on the Church the way it is to fulfill its act of contrition for the crimes committed by certain groups of people.”